CHAPTER XXV
April drew toward its close, leaving us as a parting gift in latitude 76° 19′ N., longitude 164° 45′ E. Over 76° North, and with our drift increasing in speed weekly! We were on our way now with a vengeance, moving at last toward the Pole. A few more months like April, and we might find ourselves by the middle of summer across the 83rd parallel, to establish with the Jeannette at the very least a new record for Farthest North! The effect on George Washington De Long was magical—his shoulders straightened up as if he had shed a heavy weight, his blue eyes became positively cheery, new courage oozed from his every gesture—after twenty weary months of discouragement and defeat, our third year in the Arctic was going to redeem all and send us home unashamed!
May came. The temperature rose only a little, reaching zero, but we didn’t mind that much, for in a few days we were nearing the 77th parallel. The captain’s cheerfulness began to communicate itself to the crew and a livelier spirit became decidedly manifest in all hands, with one exception, that is. Collins, of course, was the exception. He, technically a prisoner awaiting courtmartial, moped worse than ever; upset even more by the idea that now that he no longer had any active part, the expedition might really accomplish something. Physically Collins was not under restraint—no irons, no cell, not even restriction to his own stateroom, let alone restriction to the confines of the ship. The captain had no wish to risk Collins’ health by even such confinement as Danenhower was involuntarily subjected to. But relieved wholly of all duty and responsibility, Collins was in effect merely a passenger; his former work was divided between the captain, Ambler, Chipp and myself, throwing a heavier load on us, for the meteorological observations were religiously kept up. Indeed, with the ship at last rapidly changing position northward and westward, they were now increased. Still a member of the cabin mess, Collins ate with us, absolutely silent except for an ostentatiously polite “Good morning, captain,” once a day, after which his fine oblivion respecting the existence of the rest of us was an excellent wet blanket on conviviality at meals.
But other things relieved the monotony of meals a bit. Ducks and geese began to show up overhead, flying some west, some north, and occasionally landing on the small pools near by, formed by the continually changing cracks in the moving ice. Dunbar and Alexey knocked down some with their shotguns. After our continuous diet of salt beef and insipid canned meat, rest assured we bit into those heaven-sent ducks avidly, though frequently sudden cries of pain as some gourmet’s teeth came down hard on pellets of lead, showed that Ah Sam had been none too careful in extracting birdshot before serving.
The weather warmed up a bit. The sun, though never high in the heavens, stayed above the horizon twenty-four hours a day, and even at midnight we began to see him, paradoxically enough, looking at us from due north, over the unknown Pole!
But as another paradox, now that winter was going and late spring and continuous daylight were with us, the doctor for the first time on our long cruise since the diarrhoea epidemic in 1879, began again to have a string of patients. Chipp, Tong Sing, Newcomb, Alexey, Kuehne, Nindemann, and unfortunately, himself—all complained of general debility, cramps in varying degrees, and slight indications of palsy. Chipp, Tong Sing, and Newcomb, in the order named, were worst.
What was the trouble? The doctor, himself a minor sufferer, was able to work on his own symptoms as well as on those of the others in diagnosis. Naturally, since we had just come through the winter, scurvy was promptly suspected, but not a single evidence of the very obvious manifestations of that disease could the doctor find in anyone. This was some mental relief, for in the midst of all our other failures, De Long, Ambler, and I had taken considerable pride in having with my distilled water kept us free of that Arctic scourge and for a longer period than ever before in history.
But if it wasn’t scurvy, what was it? Ambler racked his brains and his medical books, going over all possible diseases that cold, exposure, darkness, poor ventilation, depression, and our diet might have exposed us to, but to no result. The symptoms were none too obvious; he could lay his finger on nothing definite. Had we developed a new Arctic disease from our unprecedented stay in the ice? The surgeon could not say—only time would tell. Meanwhile, Chipp, the worst sufferer, decidedly thin and weak, was first relieved of part of his duties and then of all of them. The other victims were told to take things easier till they had recuperated.
But as the days dragged along, they didn’t recuperate, they got worse. The doctor put Chipp on the sicklist and ordered him to bed; the same with Charley Tong Sing whose case became even more serious. Meanwhile Ambler, suffering himself, was feverishly searching his Materia Medica for an antidote. But with no definite diagnosis of the disease possible, his search was fruitless. Ambler was nearly distracted, for no ailment arising from our manner of life fitted in with the vague symptoms. And then a severe attack of colic in Newcomb gave him a clue. He checked his medical books, checked the other patients, and with a grave face went to the captain to inform him that, implausible as it seemed, without question every man on the sicklist was suffering from acute lead poisoning!
That made the mystery even deeper. If lead poisoning, where was the lead coming from? Lead poisoning was normally a painter’s disease and not for months had any man on the ship touched a paint pot or a brush. What then was the source? As the most probable cause, I had to direct suspicion at myself, for Bartlett, Lee, and I in making up our distiller piping joints, had for tightness wiped them all with red lead. Immediately, Surgeon Ambler who had daily for a year and a half been testing the water for salt, tested it for lead. He found some insignificant traces, but it seemed hard to believe such minute quantities could cause us trouble. Still we had been imbibing that water constantly and the cumulative effect might have done it. While the problem of dismantling all the pipe joints and cleaning them of red lead was being cogitated, the captain went one step further—he ordered Ah Sam to discontinue for use in making tea and coffee, the pots which had soldered joints, and to replace them with iron vessels.
And so, all full of this lugubrious discovery as to what had laid up our shipmates, we met for dinner, a much reduced mess, with only De Long, Dunbar, Danenhower, Collins and myself present. Ah Sam, substituting for the deathly ill Tong Sing, served the meal—no bear, no seal, no ducks this time—just salt beef and the ever present stewed tomatoes, our principal vegetable antidote for scurvy, the supply of which was holding out splendidly.
More quietly even than usual, dinner proceeded. I carved the salt beef, Dunbar ladled out the tomatoes. Ah Sam padded around the cabin with the dishes. Moodily we bent over our plates, and then an outburst, doubly noticeable in that silence, brought us erect.
“Bah!” burst out the semi-blinded Danenhower, spitting out a mouthful of food. “I don’t mind breaking my teeth on duck, but who, for God’s sake, shot these tomatoes?”
“Shot the tomatoes, Dan? What do you mean?” asked the puzzled skipper.
“Just what I say,” mumbled Dan, trying more delicately with his napkin now to rid his mouth of the remainder. “They’re full of birdshot!”
I walked over and examined the tomatoes spattered on the tablecloth before Danenhower. Sure enough, there in the reddish mess were several black pellets of solder, looking remarkably like birdshot! A light dawned on me.
“Ah Sam!” I ordered, “bring me right away, half a dozen unopened cans of tomatoes and a can opener, savvy?”
“I savvy; light away I bling cans from galley,” answered the cook, and in a few minutes dinner was suspended and forgotten, while the mess table was converted into a workbench on which I opened cans and poured the contents into a large tureen. In every can we found drops of solder, mostly tiny! Evidently when the canned tomatoes were stewed before being served, the hot acid juices of the cooking tomatoes completely dissolved the fine lead pellets. They had never been noticed till a few drops large enough to escape complete solution had come through for Dan to bite on!
We called the sick doctor from his bunk. He promptly got his chemicals and then and there tested the hot stewed tomatoes already served for dinner. The percentage of lead in them was far above anything found in our water. No question about it now, the tomatoes were the cause—our mysterious lead poisoning was at last solved!
But the captain was still both perplexed and worried. Perplexed, because from the day we entered the ice, we had had canned tomatoes four times a week. Why hadn’t we been poisoned before and why were some of us apparently still unaffected? He was worried, because if we gave up tomatoes, our last source of anything like vegetables, what (with our lime-juice now practically gone) over the long months to come was going to save us from scurvy?
Dr. Ambler quickly resolved both difficulties by pointing out that as for the perplexity, till May came, we had had tomatoes but four times a week while since then we had had them daily, thus practically doubling the lead dosage and nearly as promptly starting the trouble. As for the reason why some were victims and some not—of the bad cases, Chipp, weak already from overwork and in poor condition, was a natural victim; Newcomb, little resistant to anything, another; as for himself and the bluejackets who were a little less affected, they were just somewhat more susceptible than some of the rest of us, but in a short time the lead would have got us all. Tong Sing’s case, worse than anybody’s, he had to confess he couldn’t explain, but Ah Sam could and quickly did make it crystal clear,
“Cholly Tong Sing, he likee tomato! He eat plenty, allee same bleakfast, dinner, supper!”
All we need do to prevent scurvy was go back to the issue of tomatoes only four times a week, which quantity of lead absorption we had before apparently withstood. In addition we tried to reduce the lead still further by having Ah Sam carefully strain out and remove all pellets of solder before cooking, thus keeping the lead content down to the minimum, that is, whatever the cold tomatoes had already dissolved.
So with Ah Sam clearing away the mess of emptied cans, we went back to finish our dinner, lukewarm salt beef only now; silent again, wondering, if we had to stay in the Arctic another year, whether it was preferable to eschew the tomatoes and die of scurvy or to continue eating them and pass away of chronic lead poisoning.
The day dragged along. We were in the middle of May, it being the 16th. Our rapid drift continued through the afternoon, more westerly than northerly, but either was perfectly all right with us. The ice was “livelier,” cracks and water leads showed up more frequently, the ship was often jolted by submerged masses of ice, and not so far away as earlier in the spring, high ridges of broken floes were piling up all around us. Then in the early evening after supper, from Mr. Dunbar who more out of habit than hope had crawled up to the crow’s-nest for a look around, came the cry,
“LAND!”
And sure enough, there was land! Off to the westward lay an unknown island!
The crew of the Jeannette was delirious with excitement. Instead of ice, there was land to look at, something we had dully begun to assume had somehow ceased to exist on this globe. And we had discovered it! In exploration, our voyage was no longer a blank! In honor of that, Captain De Long immediately ordered served out to all hands a double ration of rum.
Not since March, 1880, when Wrangel Land last disappeared from sight, had we seen land. As yet we could not see much of this island, nor even make out its distance, but somewhere between thirty and seventy miles off it stood, in black and white against the sky and the ice, masked a little by fog over part of it. But our imaginations ran riot over our island! That must have been the land toward which the ducks and geese were flying, and when we got there, what a feast awaited us! Some eagle-eyed observers clearly spotted reindeer on its cliffs; others even more eagle-eyed plainly distinguished the bucks from the does! Our mouths, dry from chewing on salt beef, watered in eager anticipation.
De Long, positively glowing, hugged Dunbar for discovering our island and looking happily off toward it, exclaimed,
“Fourteen months without anything but ice and sky makes this look like an oasis in the desert! Look at it, it’s our all in all! How bears must swarm on our island, Dunbar! And if you want to tell me that it contains a gold mine that’ll make us all as rich as the treasury without its debts, I’ll believe you! Our island must have everything!”
Even the sick, who came up on deck for a glimpse, were cheered by the sight, all, that is, save poor Danenhower, who nevertheless came up with the others, at least to look in that direction, knowing well enough that he alone of all of us would never see our island; that through the heavily smoked glass over his one remaining eye he could hardly see the bulwarks, let alone the distant island we had at last discovered!
Longer than anyone else, De Long stayed on deck that night, gazing off toward the island, criticizing it, guessing its distance, wishing for a favorable gale to drive us towards it, and finally before going to bed, looking carefully again at it to make sure it had not melted away.
And when at last I dragged him below to rest, he murmured knowing well the island could be only at most a little mass of volcanic rock,
“Melville, beside this stupendous island, the other events of the day sink into insignificance!”
For the next week, we drifted northwest with fair speed toward our island, with the water shoaling and the ice getting more active. By several bearings as we moved along, we discovered that when first sighted our island was thirty-four miles off. The question of making a landing began immediately to be debated, but obviously for the first few days, we were not yet at the closest point, so no decision was then arrived at. For the next three days, it blew hard, during which time we caught but few glimpses of our island as we drove northwest with the ice. When the gale abated on May 24, we got some sights and found to our pleased surprise that we were in latitude 77° 16′ N., longitude 159° 33′ E. 77° North! Another parallel of latitude left in our frozen wake; we were now moving steadily on toward the Pole!
But that was not all for May 24. Going aloft himself in the morning, De Long saw another island! Off to the westward it lay, closer to us even than our first island; and in addition, from all the lanes which had opened up in the pack, more water than he had seen since September, 1879. This second island, a little more calmly added to our discoveries than the first one, was a most welcome sight. The water however was nothing but a tantalizing vision, for none of the lanes were connected nor did they lead anywhere, least of all toward our islands, both about thirty miles away from us and from each other.
Having two islands now on our hands, we could no longer refer to the first simply as our island, as we had before lovingly done in mentioning it, for was not the second equally ours? So it becoming necessary to distinguish between them in the future, De Long took thought like Adam of old, and named them—the first after our ship and our ship’s godmother, Jeannette Island; and the second after our sponsor’s mother, Henrietta Island. Having thus taken care of our sponsor’s sister and his mother, De Long looked confidently forward to new discoveries on which he might bestow the name of our sponsor himself.
Meanwhile, the question of landing on either or both of our islands came again to the fore, the weather having cleared once more. Jeannette Island had dropped astern during our strong drift in the gale, while on Henrietta Island we were closing steadily. De Long decided therefore on May 30, six days after we had discovered it, to send a landing party over the ice to take possession of Henrietta Island and to explore it.
The journey would evidently be a dangerous one over broken and moving ice, with worst of all, the ship steadily moving with the ice away from the land. Most opinions were adverse to success, but Captain De Long ordered the trip, feeling that a knowledge of that island as a base to fall back on would be invaluable in case of disaster to the ship, and exceedingly desirous also of erecting a stone cairn there in which to leave a record of our wanderings and whereabouts (this, I think, though De Long never expressed it so, as a permanent clue to our fate should we be swallowed forever by the pack threatening us).
Not as any compliment to me, but out of sheer necessity, De Long selected me to take charge of the expeditionary party and make the attempt to land. I was the only commissioned officer of the Navy available; Danenhower, Chipp, and Ambler were incapacitated in varying degree; the captain himself, anxious as he was to have the honor of being first to plant our flag on newly discovered soil, dared not leave the ship to the only one other seagoing officer still on deck, the whaler Dunbar. So by a process of simple elimination, I was given the doubtful honor of leading. To help me were assigned Mr. Dunbar and four picked men from the crew—Quartermaster Nindemann and Erichsen, one of our biggest seamen, from the deck force; with Bartlett, fireman, and Sharvell, coalheaver, from my black gang, the latter to act as cook.
With these men, one sledge, a dinghy to ferry us over any open water, provisions for seven days (including forty-two ounces of the inevitable lime-juice and eleven gallons of distilled water but no tomatoes), navigating instruments, fifteen dogs, and the silken ensign which Emma De Long had made for the Jeannette as the particular banner to be used in taking possession, we shoved off from the vessel’s side on May 31, cheered by all the remaining ship’s company. Henrietta Island was twelve miles off over the pack, bearing southwest by west. The ship, to guide me in my return, hoisted a huge black flag, eleven feet square at the main.
Our sledge carried between boat and supplies, a load of 1900 pounds, nearly a ton. With Dunbar running ahead as a leader to encourage the dogs and the other five of us heaving on the sledge to help along, it was as much as we could do to get it underway and moving slowly over the rough ice away from the ship. The harnessed dogs behaved as usual—they were not interested in any cooperation with us. In the first fifteen minutes, several broke out of harness and returned to the ship, there of course to be recaptured by our shipmates and dragged back to the sledge.
Of our terrible three day journey over only twelve miles of live ice toward Henrietta Island, I have little to say save that it was a nightmare. We made five miles the first day, during which we lost sight of the Jeannette and her black flag; and four miles the second. At that point, Mr. Dunbar, who had been doing most of the guiding while the rest of us pushed on the sledge to help the dogs, became in spite of his dark glasses totally snow-blind and could no longer see his way, even to stumble along over the ice in our wake. So we perched him inside the dinghy, thus increasing our load, and on the third day set out again in a snow storm, guided now only by compass toward the invisible island. In the afternoon, the storm suddenly cleared, and there half a mile from us, majestic in its grandeur, stood the island! Precipitous black cliffs, lifting a sheer four hundred feet above the ice, towered over us; a little inland, four times that height, rose cloud-wreathed mountains, with glaciers startlingly white against the black peaks filling their every gorge.
As we stood there, awestruck at the spectacle, viewing this unknown land on which man had never yet set foot, the silence of those desolate mountains, awful and depressing, gripped us, driving home the loneliness, the utter separation from the world of men of this Arctic island!
We were now only half a mile from the shore which marked our goal, but as we gazed across it, cold dread seized us. What a half mile! The drifting pack, in which miles away the unresisting Jeannette was being carried along, was here in contact with immovable mountains which could and did resist. As a result, around the bases of those cliffs, were piled up broken floes by the millions, the casualties in that incessant combat between pack and rock. While moving past between were vast masses of churning ice, forever changing shape, tumbling and grinding away at each other as that stately procession of floebergs hurried along. And it was over this pandemonium, that if ever we were to plant our flag on that island, we had to pass!
To get sledge, boat, and all our provisions across was utterly hopeless. So I made a cache on a large floe of our dinghy, stowing in it all except one day’s provisions and most of our gear, raising an oar flying a small black flag vertically on the highest hummock of that floe as a marker. Next there was Dunbar. Terribly down in the mouth at having collapsed and become nothing but a hindrance, he begged to be left on the ice rather than encumber us further. But to leave an old man blinded and helpless on a drifting floe which we might never find again, was not to be thought of. In spite of his distressed pleadings, I put him on the sledge together with our scanty provisions and instruments, and then with a lashing to the neck of the lead dog who had no intention whatever of daring that devil’s churn, we started, myself in the lead.
It was hell, over floes tossing one minute high in air, the next sinking under our feet. Splashing, rolling, tumbling, we scrambled from floe to floe, wet, frozen, terrified. Only by big Erichsen’s truly herculean strength in bodily lifting out the sledge when it stuck fast did we get over safely. When at last, soaked and exhausted, we crawled up on the quiescent ice fringing the island, we were barely able to haul Dunbar, dripping like a seal, off the sledge and onto the more solid ice.
We paused there briefly while little Sharvell, his teeth still chattering from fright, clumsily prepared our cold supper. Then marching over the fixed ice, I as commander first set foot on the island and in a loud voice claimed it as a possession of the United States. I invited my shipmates ashore, and in a formal procession led by Hans Erichsen (who as a special reward was carrying our silken ensign) they landed also on the island, where Erichsen proudly jammed the flagstaff into the earth.
With a few precious drops (and precious few) of medicinal whiskey, I christened the spot Henrietta Island, after which we six sick seamen drank the remainder of the medicine in honor of the event, and then revelling in a brief tramp over real earth for the first time in over twenty-one of the longest months men have ever spent, we hauled our sleeping bags about our weary bones and lay down, at last to rest again on terra firma.
At ten a.m. we woke, startled to have slept so long, for we were not to stay on the island longer than twenty-four hours. On a bold headland nearby, we built our cairn, burying in it two cases, one zinc and one copper, containing the records with which Captain De Long had provided us. This promontory, Mr. Dunbar named “Melville Head” in my honor, but after considering its bareness of vegetation, I decided “Bald Head” was more appropriate and so entered it on the chart which I now proceeded to make.
With Bartlett and Erichsen reading instruments while I sketched, we ran a compass survey which took all day. From the high headlands, the Jeannette was plainly visible in the ice to the northeast, a black speck against the white pack, but we paid little attention to her, being anxious only to finish. While this was going on, Sharvell and Nindemann searched the valleys, shooting a few of the birds nesting in great profusion among the rocks. But aside from the birds they saw no other game—no bears, no reindeer, no seals—not a trace of animal life on that island.
In the early evening, our survey finished, we harnessed again our staked-out dogs, furled our banner, and started back.
Our retreat through the roaring ice about the island we found even more difficult than our landing. On one small floe, rounded like a whaleback, we took refuge for a moment in that cascading ice. We clung on in terror when it began rolling beneath us, evidently about to capsize. That to our dismay it finally did, but providentially we were scraped off as it went over onto the main floe. From this more solid footing we dragged up out of the icy water by their harnesses the drenched dogs and the even more drenched Dunbar clinging to the submerged sledge.
Back once more on ice moving only as part of the great Arctic pack, we breathed a little more freely, shook ourselves like the dogs to get rid of surplus water before it froze on us, and headed for the spot toward which I figured our abandoned boat had drifted. There was nothing we could recognize, there were none of our previous tracks we could follow; the arrangement of that pack had changed as completely as a shuffled deck of cards. Amongst high hummocks we could see but a little distance and I was becoming thoroughly alarmed at the prospect of never finding our boat again. Then with the weather clearing a bit, from the top of the highest hummock around, Erichsen spied in the distance the oar marking our boat. We hastened toward it, truly thankful, for we had already made away with the single day’s rations which we had carried with us, and had no longer a bite left to eat.
For two days in miserable weather we stumbled back toward the ship, steering a compass course through continuous snow. To add to our troubles, Nindemann came down with severe cramps (lead, of course) and Erichsen, who since Dunbar’s collapse had been guiding the dogs, with snow-blindness. So pitching our tent in the snow, we camped our second night, while I dragged out the medicine chest with which I had been provided by Dr. Ambler and began to read the directions. The remedy for cramps was “Tincture of capsicum in cognac.” Henrietta Island having seen the last of the cognac, the best liquid substitute available in the chest appeared to be a bottle of sweet oil, which I drew out, together with the bottle marked “Tinc. capsicum.”
My own fingers were cold and numbed, so Erichsen who wanted some of the sweet oil to rub on his chafed body which he had stripped for that purpose, volunteered to draw the corks for me. First pouring some of the sweet oil over his hands to soften them, he pulled the second cork, but so clumsily with his frozen paws, that he spilled a liberal portion of the tincture of capsicum over his badly chapped hands to discover promptly that compared to tincture of capsicum, liquid fire was a cooling, soothing lotion!
Startled, Erichsen involuntarily rubbed the mixture on his bared rump and immediately went wild. To the intense interest of his shipmates, down went Erichsen into the snow, trying to extinguish the burn, wiggling his huge form like a snake on fire. Little Sharvell, solicitously taking his arm, piped up,
“’Ere, matey, let me lead you to a ’igher ’ummock! Bli’ me if I don’t think ye’ll soon melt yer way clean through this floe!”
Nindemann began to laugh so hard at this that he completely forgot his cramps, while Dunbar, between his own groans, sang out cheerily,
“Hans, are ye hot enough yet to make the snow hiss? If ye are, when we get back, the chief can put out the forecastle stove and use ye for a heater!”
Amid the general merriment, joined in by all hands except poor Hans, big Erichsen finally managed to cool himself down in the snow enough so that he could stand an administration of pure sweet oil to the affected parts. Carefully applied by me, this soothed him enough to permit his dressing again, and with most of us in a hilarious frame of mind, we slid into our sleeping bags.
Next day, our sixth since departure, we set out again at 3 A.M., and mirth having proved a better cure than medicine, with all hands in fair shape except Dunbar who still had to ride the sledge. Within an hour we sighted the ship. This cheered us further. And the dogs recognizing the masts and realizing that at last they were pulling toward home, for the first time put their hearts and shoulders into the job. Over bad ice, we made such excellent progress that by 6 A.M. we were within a mile of the ship, apparently without having been sighted from there.
At this point, I ran into an open water lead with running ice, and unable to find a detour, had determined to launch the dinghy and ferry across when a sledge runner gave way and left us flat in the snow. We repaired the runner, but it was evident that it would never carry all the weight again. So I unloaded the boat, ferried the sledge across, and then sent it ahead with Dunbar only on it while Sharvell and I stayed behind with the dinghy and all the rest of our sledge load of equipment.
We were all soon sighted and a party came out from the ship. There on the ice, Dr. Ambler met me, and undemonstrative though he was, so overjoyed was he at our safe return that he gave me a regular bear hug.
Approaching the gangway, we caught sight of Captain De Long, enthusiastically waving to us from the deck, running up the ladder to the bridge for a better view. Then to our horror we saw him, absorbed only by our progress, step directly into the path of the flying windmill! In an instant, before anyone could cry out in warning, down came one of the huge arms, whirling before a fresh breeze, hitting him a terrific blow on the head and sending him reeling backwards down the ladder!
Fortunately the quartermaster caught him, breaking his fall, but Ambler and I, forgetting all else, rushed for the gangway, arriving on deck to find the captain crawling on hands and knees, stunned and bleeding from a great gash in his head. Ambler hurriedly bent over him, carefully feeling his skull, and announced thankfully there was no evident fracture. He helped the semi-conscious captain to his cabin, where he immediately went to work stitching up a deep four-inch long wound. By the time this was done and the bandages applied, De Long at last came out of his daze. But calloused as I was by war and many hardships it nevertheless brought tears to my eyes when his first question after his fluttering eyelids opened on the doctor bending over him, was not about himself but a faint query,
“How about Melville and his men, doctor? Are they all safe?”